You and Your Quirky Kid

At a recent pre-school musical, my son was to stand single file onstage with 13 classmates and perform "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing" while flapping the wings of his bright yellow canary suit. As the other kids sang, fidgeted or stood there, stunned by the audience, he broke ranks and began marching to his own tune. He spun, then stomped, then shimmied his way out of line as if responding to several different styles of music no one else could hear. Seemingly unfazed by the crowd of parents seated before him, he wandered about the stage, shouting his own improvisational lyrics (something about babies and broccoli), which were picked up by a nearby mike and broadcast throughout the auditorium. As the other parents laughed, I vacillated between feelings of pride (my son's such an individual!) and fear (why is he so different?).

Because, even at 4, it's clear my son is different. On the playground, he's bonded far more with one particular tricycle than with any classmate, and during circle time he's the only child who consistently wanders off to inspect the pipes under the sink or play with the push broom. His unconventional behavior may not sound like a big deal—and it wasn't, until some well-meaning educators noticed my son's quirks and asked if he'd ever been diagnosed.

But just how do you determine the difference between a nonconformist kid and a child with more serious issues that may need to be addressed? Previous generations of parents could embrace, or overlook, their child's tics, quirks or eccentric personalities much more freely than the moms and dads of today. If their daughter was reading "Moby-Dick" by first grade, she was gifted. If their toddler wasn't talking by 2, he'd likely catch up by kindergarten. Even pediatricians were far less versed in things like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the autism-spectrum disorders, which didn't start showing up on their radar screens until the '80s and early '90s. But today we know so much more about how the brain functions, what causes some unusual behavior and how a child can really benefit from early intervention, that we're obligated as "good parents" to have our children's peculiarities evaluated. (Of course, there is no mistaking the more severe forms of autism for quirkiness.) It can mean running a toddler through a bevy of experts—pediatric neurologists, speech pathologists, behavioral psychologists, socialization experts—before he's out of training pants. More and more, kids who once would have been considered slightly out of step with their peers are emerging with diagnoses of sensory-integration dysfunction, dyspraxia and pervasive developmental disorder, to name a few. In past decades, autism was thought to occur in about one child in 2,000. Today, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in 150 kids has an autism-spectrum disorder. And just last week, a new study found that the number of kids in the United States younger than 20 receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder had soared from about 18,000 in 1994 to an estimated 800,000 in 2003.

So what do we do about the eighth grader who alienates peers with his obsessive talk of baroque architecture, or the 6-year-old who'd rather spend recess talking to the hamster than playing dress-up with her classmates? Is it possible we shouldn't do anything? "Of course it is a source of deep sorrow when it is obvious that a youngster can never lead 'a normal life' because of special needs," says Dr. Elizabeth Berger, a child and adolescent psychiatrist whose books include "Raising Kids With Character." "All the same, there is something amiss when every mother is susceptible to fears whether or not this week's fashionable diagnosis applies to her child. There is something unexamined in our thinking when we elevate the need for normalcy to a state of spiritual grace, and live under a constant anxiety that we fail to measure up to its demands."

If we examine ourselves and those around us—the husband who shuns picnics because he can't stand the texture of grass, the co-worker who can't get along without those billion organic remedies on her desk—we have to admit that everyone, to some extent, is odd. The terms "normal" and "abnormal" are subjective—words whose interpretations can be as varied as the people who speak them. So when we worry about our kids' strange behavior, is it because they deviate from our own expectations of what life should be like for a "well-adjusted" 5-, 7- or 12 year-old, or is it because that little person in front of us seems to struggling way more than she should? "Parents need to ask themselves, Is this making him unhappy or just making me unhappy?" says Dr. Perri Klass, pediatrician and coauthor of "Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit In—When to Worry and When Not to Worry." "Is he having a perfectly good time in school, but he's not interested in the things the other kids are interested in? Or is he desperately trying to be part of something but doesn't seem to understand how? I'm not talking about a child who's a developmental emergency, I'm talking about the kid who's different."

According to Klass and her coauthor, Dr. Eileen Costello, skewed development, temperamental extremes and social complications are the hallmarks of so-called quirky kids. They define this enigmatic and varied group in their book as children with developmental variations: kids who don't talk on time or, alternately, "talk constantly but never seem to get their point across"; kids who have rigid routines or throw "nuclear tantrums"; toddlers who keep to themselves "while the rest of the playgroup lives up to its name."